Capturable Racial Techs

[Will]

Is the intermediate tech area really necessary? It should work the same without it, except the previously racial techs wouldn't be able to be researched if the intermediate is stolen through ship capture (if any components come from the intermediate) or Tech Espionage ops. Besides, the racial techs are supposed to be something that only certain races can comprehend (at least IMHO), thus analyzing components will allow you to see where everything fits, but not actually how it works (a la "Contact"... see alien blueprint, build machine on alien blueprint, have no clue what machine on alien blueprint does).

Anyway, looks quite interesting... I'll add it to my mental list of things to eventually (read: in two or so years) put in the mod I'll eventually (read: in two or so years, minus two or so weeks) make.

[jc173]

quote:

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Originally posted by Will:
Is the intermediate tech area really necessary? It should work the same without it, except the previously racial techs wouldn't be able to be researched if the intermediate is stolen through ship capture (if any components come from the intermediate) or Tech Espionage ops. Besides, the racial techs are supposed to be something that only certain races can comprehend (at least IMHO), thus analyzing components will allow you to see where everything fits, but not actually how it works (a la "Contact"... see alien blueprint, build machine on alien blueprint, have no clue what machine on alien blueprint does).

Anyway, looks quite interesting... I'll add it to my mental list of things to eventually (read: in two or so years) put in the mod I'll eventually (read: in two or so years, minus two or so weeks) make.

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The intermediate tech probably isn't completely necessary, but I kept it in since that was the suggestion from SJ and it provides a buffer from just gaining the tech through outright espionage. You don't gain the intermediate tech from analyzing enemy ships so you still can't research it or research higher levels in the racial weapons techs.

As for comprehending how the stuff works... I guess it depends on your view point/storyline. I can see your point about comprehending alien tech, but there's plenty of other stories/movies/shows that that present other views, Robotech is one that comes to mind. The humans managed to recreate some of the alien tech onboard the alien starship, SDF-1 and were able to repair it and build new weapons based on reverse engineering what they found. They didn't completely understand how it worked, but they could copy it. Which is basically what I wanted to do, copy enemy designs or use some of the tech in my own hulls and repair captured enemy ships. But to each his own, I though it just provided a different twist on the game.

[Marty Ward]

The way you have it set up seems to be a good compromise, you can only gain exactly what you steal. I like it.
To bad the AI doesn't analyize. Then you could do it to all the traits. You could throw some random weapons into their ship designs and then maybe get a big suprise later in the game when the Phong show up with Allegiance Converters!

[Suicide Junkie]

I think you should remove the intermediate techs, if you don't want the stuff researchable.

The way I think you have it, is that the intermediates are "tech B", while the shard cannons are under "tech C"

Therefore you could steal the intermediates via intel ops, and tehn research the "tech C" stuff.

if you make the weapons tech a "tech B" type, requiring a racial tech to research, then others will never be able to research the weapons.

As it is, you could trade away your intermediate tech, and aliens could research the weapons tech ahead of you!

[Marty Ward]

Shouldn't the intermediate tech be a racial trait tech? Then the weapons tech tree could not be researched if you analyzed a single weapon.

[This message has been edited by Marty Ward (edited 17 May 2001).]

[jc173]

I guess this still needs a little tweaking, I wouldn't want to be able to steal the techs through espionage. So I guess I could just change the racial flags on the facility/armor applied techs and weapon techs.

Making the intermediate tech a racial one is kinda redundant might as well just work off the original racial theoretical tech.

It's definately too bad the AI won't perform capture and analyze ops. We could have it take advantage of that by creating different types of attack and defense ships.

Oh by the way capturing a ship with crystal armor does give you access to crystal race facilities. I'm not sure that makes sense since most of the facilities are probably much more complex than just armor. That can probably be fixed by just tagging the facilities with the additional tech requirement of crystalurgy or whatever their theoretical tech is named.

[This message has been edited by jc173 (edited 17 May 2001).]

[Nitram Draw]

You could keep the racial tag on the items you don't want to have stolen/researched. I like the idea of components being able to be analyized, facilities maybe not. With a little editing you could tune it to the way you want with the racial tag. If you use the same prerequisite tech as the key to the entire tree and make it a racial tech the AI only has to research it once. You could then untag any tech you wanted. Your idea is good and can be made to work the way you want.